Microsoft Teams Update for Frontline Worker And Government

There are now new APIs (Application Programming Interface) for Time Clock allows integrations into the organization’s Time & Attendance system. to enable rules for how early or late the employees can clock-in and clock out. 

There are also new processes like a health screening survey that must be completed before clocking-in for the day.

Shift Settings & Permissions

With the Teams Shifts Policy, the organization can now allow users who aren’t the owner of a Teams site, to be able to edit and manage things like shift schedules, approve swaps, and authorize time off requests. This enables managers or supervisor profiles to have schedule ownership without having to be the actual owners of the entire Teams site. This is a preventive feature that has been rolled out as what this does is it reduces instances of accidentally deleting or modifying the Teams site.

Enhanced tasks publishing capabilities

Microsoft has enhanced task publishing so operations and corporate teams can now manage and plan their task distribution to frontline locations in a more clear way. As a member of a publishing team, users can now see separate Drafts, Published, and Unpublished sections to easily see which task lists are at which stage of their lifecycle. 

Microsoft has also made it easier to see the impact of publishing tasks at a glance, thanks to an updated summary that displays the number of tasks and the number of recipient teams.

This means users can easily confirm that everything looks right before actually sending.

For Government

These features are currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers, in multi-tenant cloud environments. As of now, these are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD).

Manage meeting options

Organizers are now able to modify the user experience across desktop, mobile, and we. They can do this by using the new Meeting Options to customize their meeting safety and security settings. 

The Meeting Options can be accessed in the Teams meeting invitation details in Outlook and Teams Calendar, and are available in GCC-High.

Invite-only meeting options

A new meeting setting is now available in Teams meeting options, this new feature automatically sends those who were not originally invited by the organizer to the lobby. 

For example, if an invitee forwards a meeting invitation to a colleague, when that person tries to join, they will be directed to wait in the lobby and will stay there until the host selects to admit them. This helps prevent those uninvited from joining the meeting. 

Enhanced meeting creation and expiration policies

Teams meetings and join links are disabled for users whose scheduling permissions have been revoked. This rollout has been done for added security and compliance as previously, a user could continue to reuse their old meeting join links after their scheduling capabilities have been disabled. 

This policy update automatically expires those old meeting links so they can’t be reused, eliminating this security issue altogether. 

Improvements to audio permissions settings for attendees

Meeting presenters and organizers can manage attendee audio permissions with greater flexibility now as attendees no longer must request to speak for the organizer or presenters to allow them to unmute.

In addition to this, presenters and organizers can prevent individual attendees from unmuting, instead of the old way where this was done on all attendees at once. 

More labels in Planner

Labels are a quick, visual way to categorize similar tasks in Planner and Microsoft has increased the number of labels to help Teams users get even more organized within Planner. 

As of now, users can now add up to 25 labels in all different colors to their tasks in Planner web, mobile, and in Microsoft Teams.  

New way to update the Teams Rooms app

Users can now use Teams meetings and calling functionality in their Teams Rooms on Windows. This means IT Admins can easily perform a manual update by simply downloading and running an offline app update PowerShell script to their Teams Rooms devices.  

Out of Office Setting

This is how to let others know that you are not available by scheduling your Out of Office in Teams. During this time, users’ presence status changes to “Out of Office” and their status message is displayed when someone reaches out to them via chat. 

Additionally, the user’s Outlook calendar and automatic replies are updated accordingly. 

You can reach out to EPCGroup for Microsoft Teams Consulting services for implement for implementing group chat software in your organization.